5 ms·
Seems weird to refer to it as table salt. I get that some portion of the audience doesn't otherwise know what sodium chloride is, and just saying "salt" is ambi
by robbrown451 7y ago
Seems weird to refer to it as table salt. I get that some portion of the audience doesn't otherwise know what sodium chloride is, and just saying "salt" is ambiguous, but still.
Sort of like saying that a lake is filled with "drinking water."
- apatters 7y agoI guess if I was writing the headline for this article I'd go with something like "Europa's ocean may have chemical similarities to Earth's." It gets at the interesting implication of the discovery without being too clickbaity.
- mullingitover 7y agoThe Onion: "Coke-Sponsored Rover Finds Evidence Of Dasani On Mars"
- HillaryBriss 7y agonew evidence suggests alien life forms may have high blood pressure
- cabalamat 7y agoI had a picture of a wooden table with four legs, on which was a salt cellar containing table salt.
- c3534l 7y agoIs water ambiguous? I can name three different compounds I have in my home called salt. Maybe if you're talking about food its clear what you mean, but we're talking about a whole nother planet here.
- CondensedBrain 7y agoThere are different kinds of water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiheavy_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiheavy_water Finding any of them on another planet or moon would be interesting.
- c3534l 7y agoAll of those are H2O, with some contaminants in them. When it comes to water, people mean a material primarily consisting of H2O. There's no other chemical commonly referred to as water.
- robbrown451 7y agoYes I realize that, and I don't know what the perfect headline is, but I stand by "it seems weird." I notice that Wikipedia's entry on salt says "Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts." (it also says "This article is about common table salt. For salts in chemistry, see Salt (chemistry). For table salt used in chemistry, see Sodium chloride. For other uses, see Salt (disambiguation).") Normally the word "salt" indicates sodium chloride unless it is otherwise clear from context that it might be referring to some other salt. And there is always the first sentence of the article to clear up what specific chemical you are speaking of.